What strategies are used by your CT to encourage students to attend and engage? Watch carefully how your CT moves around the room. Draw a map of the classroom and sketch a path showing (approximately) this movement.How important is student engagement to your view of how you will teach? What strategies will you employ to encourage student engagement? How will use your proximity to provide feedback and manage student behavior?Observation at high school placement. Lesson: Guided review of cell structures and organelles, based on a narrated filmstrip. Students have worksheets with spaces for structure, function, location. Teacher must stand at filmstrip projector to advance the narrator. Images are all static micrographs. Teacher stops the filmstrip every 30 seconds or so as narrator describes new organelle and dictates notes that students copy to worksheet. Projector was not set up when students arrive. Teacher asks a student to set up while she takes attendance and deals with hall pass requests. Students delay filling seats and interact until chided by teacher. One student takes another’s lunch and puts it into the classroom refrigerator, unnoticed by teacher. She does notice when the second student tries to retrieve his lunch and tells him not to open the fridge. He tries to explain but she refuses to listen. He simply waits until she is distracted again and opens the fridge and takes his lunch. Students seem to take little interest in copying down the material, but do so apathetically. Late arrivals are lost, having missed the first several notes; instruction to the whole class stops as the teacher helps them catch up. This delay increases the restlessness of some students. Quiet conversations rise in volume. Teacher does attempt to make connections to prior knowledge or relevant experience, but these are limited to structural similarities (“these look like pancakes” “these look like tubes”). She occasionally moves to the screen to point out details. The students are generally respectful and complete their seatwork, but it is a dry, dry class. The teacher’s only movement is to the screen and back to the projector, since she must manually control it. All requests for responses are to the entire class, and call outs are accepted. Thus the same students seem to always respond. I plan on avoiding the death drone by moving about the class. The images would certainly be available online, and could be presented in Power Point, with a clicker, allowing the teacher to move about the room – as long as they had the information in hand. No call outs would be permitted. Students would be asked by name to respond to my questions. Students would be told they might be called on next, and to pay attention. Row identity would be fostered, so correct answers would create positive gains for the group the student belonged to. Since I would be moving about the room, physical proximity would allow me to monitor student effort and reduce unproductive interactions.
Lesson: Guided review of cell structures and organelles, based on a narrated filmstrip. Students have worksheets with spaces for structure, function, location. Teacher must stand at filmstrip projector to advance the narrator. Images are all static micrographs. Teacher stops the filmstrip every 30 seconds or so as narrator describes new organelle and dictates notes that students copy to worksheet.
Projector was not set up when students arrive. Teacher asks a student to set up while she takes attendance and deals with hall pass requests. Students delay filling seats and interact until chided by teacher. One student takes another’s lunch and puts it into the classroom refrigerator, unnoticed by teacher. She does notice when the second student tries to retrieve his lunch and tells him not to open the fridge. He tries to explain but she refuses to listen. He simply waits until she is distracted again and opens the fridge and takes his lunch.
Students seem to take little interest in copying down the material, but do so apathetically. Late arrivals are lost, having missed the first several notes; instruction to the whole class stops as the teacher helps them catch up. This delay increases the restlessness of some students. Quiet conversations rise in volume. Teacher does attempt to make connections to prior knowledge or relevant experience, but these are limited to structural similarities (“these look like pancakes” “these look like tubes”). She occasionally moves to the screen to point out details. The students are generally respectful and complete their seatwork, but it is a dry, dry class. The teacher’s only movement is to the screen and back to the projector, since she must manually control it. All requests for responses are to the entire class, and call outs are accepted. Thus the same students seem to always respond.
I plan on avoiding the death drone by moving about the class. The images would certainly be available online, and could be presented in Power Point, with a clicker, allowing the teacher to move about the room – as long as they had the information in hand. No call outs would be permitted. Students would be asked by name to respond to my questions. Students would be told they might be called on next, and to pay attention. Row identity would be fostered, so correct answers would create positive gains for the group the student belonged to. Since I would be moving about the room, physical proximity would allow me to monitor student effort and reduce unproductive interactions.